


tighten the bolts

by patrokla



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Episode: s02e10 This Is Not For Tears, Gen, Introspection, Past Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-10
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:35:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27990855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla
Summary: He wants to see himself in history, failing that, he wants other people to see the marks his father has left on them all.
Relationships: Kendall Roy & Logan Roy
Kudos: 18





	tighten the bolts

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Paths from The First Car" by Sebastián Hasani Páramo.
> 
> Foolishly posted this at 3 am and did not include my last round of edits, so if you're reading it now and it seems different...it is!
> 
> Find me on tumblr @ leguin.

When he steps onto the helicopter he’s still not quite sure what he’s going to do next. He knows what he could do and what he should do, and exactly where those things intersect with what he wants to do. Still, there’s a part of him that flinches away from what’s coming next.

The trouble is that there have been, occasionally, very thin moments when he thought he could see the shape of how his relationship with his father might have been in some other world. Counting out his pills in the morning, afternoon, and evening, the careful memorization of the dosage and purpose of each. Folded into his arms in England, allowed to collapse against the immovable pillar of his father’s strength. Approaching his father’s chair after he’d returned home from the hospital, feeling like any words, no matter how cruel, would be a reassurance. Other people have done this, he’d thought then, other people have cared and been cared for in these ways. 

He could spend his life stripping it of its context and imagining it as something better. Carrying out his father’s orders at Vaulter like a loyal soldier, he thinks that if only he could be proud of his father, and his father proud of him, then nothing else would really matter. He’d been given biographies of generals his whole childhood, read them under his father’s watchful eye and imagined the two of them engraved in history together like Grant and Sherman, or the MacArthurs. He’s always wanted the certainty of a righteous cause. His father has never been able to give him that.

Then he moves outside of these moments and the narrative crumbles with alarming speed. There’s a part of him that cannot look at his father without seeing his hand striking Iverson or Roman, the frame of the memories juddering with the impact. He’s been watching his father do this all his life, and still he can never react in time to block the blows. He tells himself that he’s frozen in fear or disbelief, but he doesn’t believe it. Closer to the truth would be that this is the role most acceptable to his father for him to play, the failed protector, the shield that does nothing but obscure the sightline between aggressor and victim. It redirects the blame, makes Kendall appear useless, complicit, or both. Kendall was born in that place, and he’d almost be comfortable there if it didn’t mean he had to look his own son in the eyes and acknowledge that the one person he can’t protect him from is his own grandfather.

He doesn’t want to be that kind of animal. He doesn’t want to be an animal at all. He wants to make plans and see them through, not collapse cowering and trembling in the wake of their inevitable failure, hoping for the mercy of a bullet over a hound’s teeth. He is never in control, he is permanently ten, twelve, twenty years old, sitting in the dining room, watching his father berate them over Christmas dinner and giving Roman bruises to bring back from the school break. Everything he’s ever done to try and escape that room has only brought the walls closer. His father demanded obedience and conformity from him, and was always disappointed when he got it.

He wants to see himself in history, failing that, he wants other people to see the marks his father has left on them all. It sounds like an excuse for his own behavior, and maybe it is, but more than anything else it’s the real need to take one free breath. Anything could come next - death, prison, a total collapse of civilization. Nuclear winter. He just wants to take one step out of that room.

He looks at the window of the helicopter, watches the light turn the waves into shards of diamond, and feels the slight weight of the cards in his breast pocket. His ears ring with the sound of a hand hitting flesh. 

He makes a decision.


End file.
